Monkey King

The next thing I made on the wheel I kind of liked, and it was getting close to the end of the hour anyway, so I put it aside to be fired, then washed up. I meandered over to where Lillith was standing by some wooden racks displaying the work of other patients. She wasn’t looking at them though. She seemed concerned with something on the knee of her jeans, rubbing at it furiously.

“What’s the matter, do you have a stain?”

“Got to put it out.”

“Put what out?”

“I’m on fire,” she said.

At breakfast the MH, a new one, asked where Douglas was.

No one knew. It wasn’t unusual for one of us to be missing mornings: bad nights were common, and there were always shrink appointments. Still, they kept pretty close tabs on us. He must have pla

By eight-thirty it had already hit seventy, one of those freakish March days where at school you’d see people in tank tops and cutoffs lounging on the grass. Forcing spring. We were all in good spirits. On the way back from breakfast Lillith and Rachel linked arms and did the “We’re off to see the wizard” gallop down the flagstone path toward the house. I was lagging behind, watching the ducks on the lake. Even when I saw the ambulance it didn’t occur to me that anything was wrong. We were used to them at all times of the day gliding up the snaky drive to the admitting ward. Two men in light green uniforms emerged from the front door of our unit carrying the stretcher. They went by so fast all I got was a glimpse of the enormous wrapped body and blue eyelids. I thought the person must be dead until I saw that he was hooked up to an I.V. bag.

Later they figured out he had gotten the razor blades from his father on family therapy night. Usually blades were doled out one by one, and you had to turn them into the nurses’ station when you were through. A casual request: “Dad, the blades they have here really suck, could you bring me some Wilkinson’s?”

In the downstairs bathroom where he’d puked up raspberry licorice, not ten yards from the nurses’ station, Douglas had shaved his head completely bald. Then with a new blade he’d sliced open his carotid artery.

“Right here,” explained Lillith, sliding the side of her index finger diagonally down the front of her own ski

Douglas made the kind of mess you didn’t want to hear about. Five more minutes, they said, and we would have lost him. Five more minutes, and there would have been more of him outside his skin than in. They blocked the end of the downstairs hallway to clean up with mops and buckets, and a section of carpeting had to be cut away.

Compared to Douglas I was an amateur.

We had an emergency group meeting and then we went to dance therapy where we lay on our mats and listened to spacey music. Mel didn’t participate. He stood in the doorway and chain-smoked. His face had a closed-in look, which I took to be a bad sign.

Sure enough, that night after di

The nurse brought out the syringe. I knew I shouldn’t watch but I couldn’t help it. They pulled down the back of his jeans, and as the needle slipped in, he threw back his head and howled. It was the most primal sound I’d ever heard a human being make, raising the hairs on the back of my neck.

For the first time I could truly believe I was in a loony bin.

Mel was knocked down to Status One, standard procedure for such a major acting-out. Before lunch Lillith and I went into the dayroom to see how he was doing. He was out of the straitjacket, looking normal, his tray already set up on the coffee table, as far away as possible from the TV, which was Pajama Man’s territory.

“How’re you feeling?” Lillith asked.

“Nothing like a Thorazine hangover,” he said breezily. But the only clue to what had happened the night before was a slight darkness under his eyes. He was nineteen, after all. We watched as he unfurled the paper napkin as appreciatively as if it had been made of the finest linen, spreading it out on his lap with a flourish. He ate European style, cutting the food into tiny bites before popping them into his mouth like kisses. It was grilled chicken, garnished with sprigs of rosemary.

“That’s what I’m having,” I said.

“I’m afraid it’s not on the menu.”

“What do you mean?”

Mel wiped his mouth with his napkin, looking a little embarrassed. “My dad sent it over. He owns a restaurant. Here—” He speared a morsel of chicken on his fork and held it out to me.

“No thanks.”

“You sure? It’s awfully good.”

I saw that his eyes were not green, as I’d first thought, but a clear hazel with a dark gray rim around the pupil.

A badly photographed postcard of a town square with cobble-stoned streets and window boxes full of garish red flowers. It could have been anywhere in Europe. But the handwriting was just as I remembered it—small and careless, with uncrossed t’s and dots from the i’s flying all over the place.

Sa—I wanted to send you Monet’s poppies but it’s not the season. De

On Saturday night I attended a dance. Mixers, they called them. The only thing I could think of were boarding school mixers, where you wrote down your height on a list and were then bused to a boys’ school and matched up with someone who tried to ditch you right after di

The gym where we had rec therapy was darkened and blasting with old disco from a sound system set up near the bleachers. The adolescent girls leaned up against the walls behind the basketball hoops, smoking and talking mostly to each other. They seemed one of two types: big-boned and ma

“Any news about Id Squid?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Duggle-ass.”

I told her what we’d been told that morning—he’d been upgraded from critical to serious.

“Gruesome what he did, huh?” The girl shook her head, hair flying—she was one of the wispy ones—and gave a few hard chomps to her gum. The heels of her cowboy boots scraped the freshly waxed floor as she turned to stroll back to her friends.

Lillith got up and started dancing all by herself, on the edge of the floor. She shut her eyes and whirled with her arms outstretched, at the same sultry tempo no matter what was playing. Every so often she’d stop and scratch herself—her nose, under the arms, behind the knees. She was wearing layers again, and her hair was still up in braids—it didn’t look like she’d washed it for the entire week she’d worn it like that. Watching her, it hit me again how scarily thin she was, in a different way from the adolescent anorexics. They were taut with the control needed to warp their bodies into art. Lillith seemed at the mercy of something bigger than herself, becoming more and more brittle under its centrifugal force.